April 29, 2006

The multilingual anthem

At least 389 versions [of "The Star-Spangled Banner"] have been recorded, according to Allmusic.com, a quick reference used by musicologists to get a sense of what's on the market. Now that [Jimi] Hendrix's "Banner" has mellowed into classic rock, it's hard to imagine that once some considered it disrespectful. The other recordings embrace a vast musical universe: from Duke Ellington to Dolly Parton to Tiny Tim. But musicologists cannot name another foreign-language version.

I don't know which "musicologists" Montgomery consulted, but Wikipedians have had better luck finding other foreign-language versions of the anthem. So far contributors to the Wikipedia page for "Nuestro Himno" have turned up examples in German, Yiddish, Samoan, French, and Latin. Not only that, they discovered a number of other Spanish versions reproduced on the website of the U.S. State Department. (Will this page be removed now that President Bush has declared that the anthem "ought to be sung in English"?)

A site on German lieder provides two translations into German, the first by Niklas Müller from 1861 and the second by an unknown composer published between 1861 and 1864. The first stanza of each rendering:

On Mendele, a Yiddish literature and language mailing list, Leonard Prager supplied the lyrics for a Yiddish version of the anthem by Ber Gri (taken from In dinst fun folk; almanakh fun yidishn folks-ordn, New York: Book League of the Jewish People's Fraternal Order I.W.O., 1947, p. 112). The first stanza:

The Wikipedia article also notes a reference to a French version of the anthem translated by an Acadian (Cajun) organization in Louisiana, though no lyrics are given. And finally, Christopher Brunelle has translated the third stanza into Latin (found on the abovementioned German lieder page as well as the Classics-L mailing list):

In case you're wondering about the original lyrics for the anthem's rarely sung third stanza, here they are:

And where is that band
Who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country
Will leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution!
No refuge can save
The hireling and slave
From the terror of death and the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner
In triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.